Hermione

By H.D.

Book Overview

This autobiographical novel, an interior self-portrait of the poet H. D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a find, ' a posthumous treasure. In writing HERmione, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was peculiarly blighted. She was in her early twenties--a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place... Waves to fight against, to fight against alone...'I am Hermione Gart, a failure'--she cried in her dementia, 'l am Her, Her, Her.' She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl who was, if not lesbian, then certainly of bisexual bent, brought an atmosphere that made her hold on everyday reality more tenuous. This stormy course led to mental breakdown, then to a turning point and a new beginning as her own true self, as Her"--the poet H.D. Perdita Schaffner, H.D.'s daughter, who can remember back to the time in 1927 when her mother was barricaded with her typewriter behind a locked door, working on this very novel, has provided a charming and telling introduction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811208176
• ISBN13: 9780811208178
• Release Date: November 1981
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Fast and quality

They delivered exactly what they described, a quality book in a short amount of time. Highly recommend.

A portrait of the artist...

...as a genius. There are a lot of threads to follow in this layered and evocative monster of a novel. Here are a couple to follow. To start with, there's the Shakespeare business. While it's true that this is a "fictionalized" autobiography, it's also clearly a response to themes in The Winter's Tale--think of Hermione "turned to stone," and of hardness of heart. Then there's the psychomachia. When H.D. touches on an idea, she often will elaborate it in action. Hermione thinks about her experiences and her mind as a space full of doors; immediately, we follow her through the doors within her family's house, as if exploring the collective mind of the family and of Hermione herself. There's more, of course. "People make things and things make people." If that's true, then this "thing" called Hermione may change your view of things. The only weakness in the book to my mind is all that Freudian klapptrapp (see, by the way, Nabokov's Pale Fire or Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.) Enjoy...

Female Writer Grows Up

For those who know her society of partners: Erza Pound, Aldington, DH Lawerence; this book begins with her relationship of the first. Amongst her eccentric family, and bisexual classmate, HD presents a poetic sketch of her coming of age which is contrasted between her erratic hang-ups. Sometime sounding like Stein, other times Kerouac, Hilda plays with earthy metaphors which derives from her early years in the Imagist movement. Nevertheless, there was more to HD than being the Imagist's main figure; what went beyond is in this book.

Mad Genius

This book was written by Seattle poet Jesse Bernstein. It rules